New DevOps plugin for CloudShell: TeamCity by JetBrains

Posted by Pascal Joly January 27, 2018

Electric cars may be stealing the limelight these days, but in this blog, we'll discuss a different kind of newsworthy plugin: Quali just released the TeamCity plugin, to help DevOps teams integrate CloudShell automation platform and JetBrains TeamCity pipeline tool.

JetBrains is well known for its large selection of powerful IDEs. Comes to mind their popular PyCharm for Python developers. They've also built a solid DevOps offering over the years, including TeamCity, a popular CI/CD tool to automate the release of applications.

So what does this new integration bring to the TeamCity user? Let's step back and consider the challenges most software organizations are trying to solve with application release.

The Onus is on the DevOps team to meet Application Developer Needs and IT budget constraints.

Application developers and testers have a mandate to release as fast and as possible. However, they are struggling to get in a timely manner, an environment that represents accurately the desired state of the application once deployed in production. On the other hand, IT departments do have budget constraints on any resource deployed during or before production, so the onus is on the DevOps team to meet these business needs.

The CloudShell solution provides environments modeling that can closely match the end state of production using standard blueprints. Each blueprint can be deployed with standard out of the box orchestration that can provision complex application infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment. As illustrated in the diagram above, the ARA tool (TeamCity) triggers the deployment of a Cloud Sandbox at each stage of the pipeline.

The built-in orchestration also takes care of the termination of the virtual infrastructure once the test is complete. The governance and control CloudShell provides around these Sandboxes guarantee the IT department will not have to worry about budget overruns.

Integration process made simple

As we've discussed earlier, when it comes to selecting a DevOps tool for Application Release Automation, there is no lack of options. The market is still quite fragmented and we've observed from the results of our DevOps/Cloud survey as well as our own customer base, that there is no clear winner at this time.

No matter what choice our customers and prospects make, we make sure integrating with Quali's CloudShell Sandbox solution is simple: a few configuration steps that should be completed in a few minutes.

Since we have developed a large number of similar plugins over the last 2 years, there are a few principles we learned along the way and strive to follow:

Ease of use: the whole point of our plugins is to be easy to configure to get up and running quickly. Typically, we provide wrapper scripts around our REST API and detailed installation and usage instructions. We also provide a way to test the connection between the ARA tool (e.g. TeamCity) and CloudShell once the plugin is in installed.

Security: encrypt all passwords (API credentials) in both storage and communication channels.

Scalability: the plugin architecture should support a large number of parallel executions and scale accordingly to prevent any performance bottleneck.